The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2 page)

Both Arabs and Turks produced a vast literature describing their struggles against Christian Europe, from the first Arab incursions in the eighth century to the final Turkish retreat in the twentieth. But until the modern period, when European concepts and categories became dominant, Islamic soldiers, officials, and historians almost always referred to their opponents not in territorial or national terms but simply as infidels (
k
fir
), or sometimes by vague general terms like Franks or Romans. Similarly, they never referred to their own side as Arab or Persian or Turkish; they identified themselves as Muslims. This perspective helps to explain, among other things, Pakistan’s concern for the Taliban and their successors in Afghanistan. The name Pakistan, a twentieth-century invention, designates a country defined entirely by its Islamic religion and allegiance. In every other respect, the country and people of Pakistan are—as they have been for millennia—part of India. An Afghanistan defined by its Islamic identity would be a natural ally, even a satellite, of Pakistan. An Afghanistan defined by ethnic nationality, by contrast, could be a dangerous neighbor, advancing irredentist claims on the Pashto-speaking areas of northwestern Pakistan and perhaps even allying itself with India.

References to early, even to ancient history are commonplace in public discourse. In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, for instance, both sides waged massive propaganda campaigns that frequently evoked events and personalities dating back as far as the seventh century, to the battles of Qadisiyya (637
C.E.
) and Karbala (680
C.E.
). The battle of Qadisiyya was won by the Arab Muslim invaders of Iran against the defending army of the Persian shah, not yet converted to Islam and therefore, in Muslim eyes, still pagans and infidels. Both sides could thus claim it as their victory—for Saddam Hussein, of Arabs over Persians, for the Ayatollah Khomeini, of Muslims over unbelievers. The references to these battles were not detailed descriptions or narratives but rapid, incomplete allusions, yet both sides employed them in the secure knowledge that they would be picked up and understood by their audiences on both sides, even by the large proportions of those audiences that were illiterate. It is hard to imagine purveyors of mass propaganda in the West making their points by allusions dating from the same period, to the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy in England or the Carolingian monarchs in France. In the same spirit, Usama bin Ladin insults President Bush by likening him to Pharaoh, and accuses Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Powell (named together) as having wrought greater devastation in Iraq through the Gulf War of 1991 and after than did the Mongol khans who in the mid-thirteenth century conquered Baghdad and destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate. Middle Easterners’ perception of history is nourished from the pulpit, in the schools, and by the media, and although it may be—indeed, often is—slanted and inaccurate, it is nevertheless vivid and powerfully resonant.

On February 23, 1998,
Al-Quds al-‘Arabi,
an Arabic newspaper published in London, printed the full text of a “Declaration of the World Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders.” According to the paper, the statement was faxed to them, with the signatures of Usama bin Ladin and the leaders of Jihad groups in Egypt, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The statement—a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times poetic Arabic prose—reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar. Bin Ladin’s grievances as set forth in this document are not quite what many would expect. The declaration begins with an exordium, quoting the more militant passages in the Qur’an and in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, and then continues: “Since God laid down the Arabian peninsula, created its desert, and surrounded it with its seas, no calamity has ever befallen it like these Crusader hosts that have spread in it like locusts, crowding its soil, eating its fruits, and destroying its verdure; and this at a time when the nations contend against the Muslims like diners jostling around a bowl of food.”

From here the declaration goes on to talk of the need to understand the situation and act to put it right. The facts, it says, are known to everyone and are set forth under three main headings.

First—For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.

Though some in the past have disputed the true nature of this occupation, the people of Arabia in their entirety have now recognized it.

There is no better proof of this than the continuing American aggression against the Iraqi people, launched from Arabia despite its rulers, who all oppose the use of their territories for this purpose but are subjugated.

Second—Despite the immense destruction inflicted on the Iraqi people at the hands of the Crusader Jewish alliance, and in spite of the appalling number of dead, exceeding a million, the Americans nevertheless, in spite of all this, are trying once more to repeat this dreadful slaughter. It seems that the long blockade following after a fierce war, the dismemberment and the destruction are not enough for them. So they come again today to destroy what remains of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third—While the purposes of the Americans in these wars are religious and economic, they also serve the petty state of the Jews, to divert attention from their occupation of Jerusalem and their killing of Muslims in it.

There is no better proof of all this than their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest of the neighboring Arab states, and their attempt to dismember all the states of the region, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Egypt and Sudan, into petty states, whose division and weakness would ensure the survival of Israel and the continuation of the calamitous Crusader occupation of the lands of Arabia.

These crimes, the statement goes on to say, amount to a “clear declaration of war by the Americans against God, His Prophet, and the Muslims. In such a situation, it is the unanimous opinion of the ulema throughout the centuries that when enemies attack the Muslim lands, Jihad becomes a personal duty of every Muslim.”

The signatories quote various Muslim authorities and then proceed to the final and most important part of their declaration, the fatwa, laying down that “to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Hara
m mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim.”

After citing some further relevant Qur’an verses, the document continues: “By God’s leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God’s command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can. Likewise we call on the Muslim ulema and leaders and youth and soldiers to launch attacks against the armies of the American devils and against those who are allied with them from among the helpers of Satan.” The declaration and the fatwa conclude with a series of further quotations from Muslim scripture.

The Gulf War of 1991, in the common Western perception, was launched by the United States and a coalition of Arab and other allies to free Kuwait from Iraqi conquest and occupation and to protect Saudi Arabia against Iraqi aggression. To view this war as an American aggression against Iraq may seem a little odd, but this perspective is widely accepted in the Islamic world. As the memory of Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait fades, attention is focused on the sanctions against Iraq, the American and British planes patrolling the skies from bases in Arabia, the suffering of the Iraqi people, and increasingly, the perceived American bias in favor of Israel.

The three areas of grievance listed in the declaration—Arabia, Iraq, Jerusalem—will be familiar to observers of the Middle Eastern scene. What may be less familiar is the sequence and emphasis with which these three are presented. This will be no surprise to anyone versed in Islamic history and literature. For Muslims, as we in the West sometimes tend to forget, the Holy Land par excellence is Arabia and especially the Hijaz and its two holy cities—Mecca, where the Prophet was born, and Medina, where he established the first Muslim state; the country whose people were the first to rally to the new faith and became its standard-bearers. The Prophet Muhammad lived and died in Arabia, as did his immediate successors, the caliphs, in the headship of the community. Thereafter, except for a brief interlude in Syria, the center of the Islamic world and the scene of its major achievements was Iraq, and its capital, Baghdad, was the seat of the caliphate for half a millennium. For Muslims, no piece of land once added to the realm of Islam can ever be finally renounced, but none compare in significance with Arabia and Iraq.

And of these two, Arabia is by far the more important. The classical Arabic historians tell us that in the year 20 of the Muslim era, corresponding to 641
C.E.,
the Caliph ‘Umar decreed that Jews and Christians should be removed from all but the southern and eastern fringes of Arabia, in fulfillment of an injunction of the Prophet uttered on his deathbed: “Let there not be two religions in Arabia.”

The people in question were the Jews of the oasis of Khaybar, in the north, and the Christians of Najran, in the south. Both were ancient and deep-rooted communities, Arab in their speech, culture, and way of life, differing from their neighbors only in their faith.

The attribution of this saying to the Prophet was impugned by some earlier Islamic authorities. But it was generally accepted, and it was put into effect. The expulsion of religious minorities is extremely rare in Islamic history—unlike in medieval Christendom, where expulsions of Jews and, after the Reconquest, of Muslims were normal and frequent. Compared with European expulsions, ‘Umar’s decree was both limited and compassionate. It did not include southern and southeastern Arabia, not seen as part of the Islamic Holy Land. And unlike the Jews and Muslims driven out of Spain and other European countries, to find what refuge they could elsewhere, the Jews and Christians of Arabia were resettled on lands assigned to them, the Jews in Syria and Palestine, the Christians in Iraq. The process was also gradual rather than sudden, and there are reports of Jews and Christians in Khaybar and Najran for some time after the decree.

The expulsion was in due course completed, and from then until now the Holy Land of the Hijaz has been forbidden territory for non-Muslims. According to the school of Islamic jurisprudence accepted by the Saudi state and by Usama bin Ladin and his followers, for a non-Muslim even to set foot on the sacred soil is a major offense. In the rest of the kingdom, non-Muslims, while admitted as temporary visitors, were not permitted to establish residence or practice their religions. The Red Sea port of Jedda for long served as a kind of religious quarantine area, in which foreign diplomatic, consular, and commercial representatives were allowed to live on a strictly temporary basis.

From the 1930s, the discovery and exploitation of oil and the consequent growth of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, from a small oasis town to a major metropolis brought many changes and a considerable influx of foreigners, predominantly American, affecting every aspect of Arabian life. Their presence, still seen by many as a desecration, may help to explain the growing mood of resentment.

Arabia was briefly threatened by the Crusaders in the twelfth century
C.E.
After their defeat and eviction, the next perceived infidel threat to Arabia began in the eighteenth century, with the consolidation of European power in South Asia and the appearance of European, in other words, Christian, ships off the Arabian shores. The resulting sense of outrage was at least one of the elements in the religious revival that was inspired in Arabia by the Wahhabi movement and led by the House of Saud (Arabic,
Su’
d
), the founders of the Saudi state. During the period of Anglo-French influence and then domination in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the imperial powers ruled Egypt, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. They nibbled at the fringes of Arabia, in Aden and the Persian Gulf, but were wise enough to have no military and minimal political involvement in the affairs of the peninsula.